Where You Once Belonged

by Kent Haruf

  In Denver we took a couple of rooms at a motel on Interstate 70 near Stapleton Airport. There was an indoor swimming pool connected to the motel and the boys swam for awhile, practicing their dives, while Jessie and I watched them and had a drink. There was also a couple from Texas swimming in the pool who said they were on their honeymoon from Nacogdoches. They seemed very young and happy. The girl was plump, with a pretty round-cheeked face, and her husband kept pulling her into the water and squeezing her and whispering into her ear; then she would splash him and laugh and swim away. Later they climbed out and walked back to their motel room, with his arm around her waist, and we didn’t see them again.

  When TJ and Bobby were finished swimming they took a shower and we ate an early supper in the motel restaurant. Afterward we went out to a movie. We drove across town to a theater in a shopping mall and had popcorn and Cokes and sat in the dark theater watching the screen. But I couldn’t keep my mind on the story. They had done what they could to make it seem plausible that an Amish girl would fall in love with a city detective and there were many dramatic scenes and wonderful photography, with a growing sense of something ominous about to happen, but when the violence came it seemed too far away for me to believe it. I sat beside Jessie with my arm over her thin shoulders and watched her face. When we were outside again she and the boys thought it was a good movie. Probably it was. But I couldn’t be interested just then in somebody else’s unhappiness.

  Later that night in bed in the motel room with Bobby and TJ asleep in the room next to ours, I told Jessie some of what I’d been worrying about.

  “I know,” she said. “But don’t you see it’ll be all right now? Isn’t that what you said? That it was the best thing for him just to leave?”

  “That was this morning. When I first heard about it. I felt surer then.”

  “But nothing’s happened to make you change your mind, has it?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “And there isn’t anything we can do about it now, even if there is something?”

  “No.”

  “Then will you please put your arm around me and hold me? It doesn’t do any good to worry about it.”

  “I know.”

  “And you know I love you.”

  “I just don’t want anything to change.”

  “Move your arm so I can come closer. There,” she said, “isn’t that better?”

  “Yes. That’s much better.”

  “I thought you’d see reason finally.”

  We were lying very close together. She felt warm and silky beside me and I began to make love to her then in the dark motel room, with just the dim light showing through the curtains and the sounds of traffic going by outside on the interstate. But everything seemed different now and uncertain. Afterward when we were quiet once more, we lay close together and Jessie went to sleep immediately.

  The next morning we got up late and ate breakfast. Then we checked out of the motel. We had decided to spend the day driving over to Boulder and across the mountain to Estes Park. The tourist season was over and skiing hadn’t started yet, so it would be quiet and peaceful in the mountains.

  When we got to Estes Park in the afternoon we stopped and walked along the streets, looking at Big Thompson River where it went through town and peered in at the shop windows at the pottery and pewter and the expensive brand-name clothes. We bought some locally made chocolate and also some cheese and fruit and sliced ham and dark bread so we could have an evening picnic; then we walked back to the car and drove north out of town along the back way toward Loveland, winding narrowly down to Glen Haven and Drake, and finally pulled off the highway at a place where there were picnic tables beside the creek. It was late in the afternoon then; the canyon was all in shade. We put our coats on and TJ and Bobby climbed among the rocks beside the creek and dropped pebbles into the pools and floated pinecones through the narrow rapids, running alongside to follow the pinecones as they swirled and bobbed on the top of the water. Then we had supper ready, set out on the picnic table. “Do you want to call them?” Jessie said.

  I called them but they couldn’t hear me because of the noise of the creek. So I walked down to where they were. One of the pinecones had gotten hung up on a snag and they were poking at it with a stick. The stick wasn’t long enough and they couldn’t quite reach it. “You try,” Bobby said.

  I took the stick and poked and made a sweeping motion, but couldn’t reach it, and leaned farther out and suddenly lost my footing so that I stepped down into the water and filled both shoes. “Jesus,” I said. “Christ, that’s cold.” The boys giggled and pointed at my feet. I was standing in the water with my good shoes on. “You bums,” I said. “You lousy bums.” I poked the stick again and dislodged the pinecone and it floated away. Then I stepped back onto the bank and, suddenly making a grab, took both boys around the head, wrestling with them against my chest.

  “So. You think that’s funny, do you? Making a man get his feet wet? You think that’s funny?”

  “Yes. We do.” They were still giggling.

  I squeezed them a little bit. “You think so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Still?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right,” I said. I squeezed them one more time. “Now what do you think?”

  “We still think it’s funny.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I guess it is, then.” I hugged them both. Then we walked back to the picnic table. I made a play of taking giant steps and sloshing.

  “Mom,” TJ shouted when we approached the table. “He fell in the creek.”

  “Who did?”

  “Pat.”

  “Oh my.”

  “And he got his shoes wet.”

  “And he cussed too,” Bobby said.

  “Did you?” Jessie said.

  “Hell, no.”

  “Yes, he did, Mom.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But they made me.”

  “What a mess,” Jessie said. “Look at you.”

  “I know it,” I said.

  “But you should have seen him, Mom,” TJ said. They started laughing again and took turns telling her about it while we sat down to eat.

  It was cold and almost dark by the time we finished supper. Still it seemed pleasant there, the four of us, sitting at the same table, with the sound of the creek nearby and the smell of pine and blue spruce all around us. Finally we left. The boys had to go to school the next day and Jessie and I had to go back to work.

  We drove home out of the mountains in the dark on Highway 34, down through Loveland and Greeley and on through Fort Morgan and Brush onto the High Plains, past Akron and then into Holt County and finally Holt, with its blue streetlights showing from a distance and then closer, and then the streets all quiet and empty when we drove into town. We walked up the steps into their apartment on the edge of town. We put the boys to bed and went to bed ourselves. We were all exhausted. Jessie and I talked very briefly and went to sleep.

  Sometime after midnight I woke again, thinking I’d heard a noise. I lay listening for a minute in the dark. Then I heard it again in the front room. I sat up. Now slowly the doorway filled and it was Jack Burdette. In the faint light from the street corner I could see him standing in the door, massive and dark; he smelled of alcohol and there was something across his arm. I started to get up. Then he found the bedroom switch on the wall and turned the light on. Jessie was suddenly awake too. She sat up.

  “Hell,” he said. “Don’t you two never wear clothes? Jesus Christ, look at you.”

  Jessie pulled the sheet around her. I started to swing out of bed.

  “Wait now,” Burdette said. “I’m not ready for you to move yet. Just sit there for a minute.”

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “What do you think I want?”

  “There’s nothing here for you. You know that.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, there is something.”

  He was leaning against the w
all, looking at us. He had cleaned up since Friday night, since he had been released. His eyes were bloodshot, but he was clean-shaven now and he was wearing a maroon shirt and a pair of new-looking tan slacks. The shirt was stretched tight over his gut, and lying across his arm was a shotgun. He motioned with it, pointing it at me.

  “I told you I had family here. But you never believed me, did you?”

  “That’s over,” I said.

  “No, it isn’t, goddamn it.” He was talking very angrily. “Nothing’s over. Is it, Jessie?”

  “Yes, it is,” she said. “I’m through, Jack. Leave me alone now. Please. I want you to leave me alone.”

  “Maybe you just think you’re through,” he said.

  “No. I am.”

  “I’m not, though. You’re what I got left. I’m not through.”

  “But I want you to leave me alone. Can’t you just leave? You’re good at that.”

  “I’m taking you with me this time. All three of you.”

  “No,” Jessie said. “No, you’re not!” She began to cry, looking fiercely at him. She wrapped the sheet tighter around her.

  I stood up. “Goddamn you. Get the hell out of here.”

  “Shut up,” he said. “Shut your mouth.”

  He stepped away from the wall toward me, leveling the gun at my face.

  “And you get up,” he said to Jessie. “You get dressed now.” He reached down and jerked the sheet away from her; she was kneeling on the bed with her arms across her breasts. He was still pointing the shotgun at me. “Do what I say. Get dressed and don’t say anything.”

  “Jessie.”

  “I told you,” Burdette said.

  “Jessie,” I said, “don’t.”

  She was still crying. She looked at me and slowly got out of bed and went over to the closet. She began to get dressed. Burdette stood watching her. And I hated him now; I hated him. While he was watching her I made a sudden grab for the shotgun but he jerked it away and slammed it against my head. Then I was lying on the wood floor beside the bed, naked, sick to my stomach. There was blood running from my ear. I stood up wobbily, bracing myself against the headboard.

  “Try that again,” he said.

  “You son of a bitch. Leave her alone.”

  “Next time I’ll kill you.”

  Jessie had finished dressing now. She was wearing jeans and a blouse and a warm sweater. He told her to pack some extra things to take with her.

  “Where’s your suitcase?”

  “It’s under the bed.”

  “Get it.”

  “Jack. Don’t do this. Please, don’t.” Her eyes were red and her hair was tangled. “Please.”

  “Get your suitcase.”

  She was still standing in front of the closet. She didn’t move. Then he shoved the end of the shotgun barrel against my chest, pushing me against the wall.

  “Did you hear me?” he said to her. “Start packing.”

  She knelt beside the bed and pulled the suitcase out, then she stood and walked around the bed to the dresser and removed some clothes, putting them into the suitcase and closing it.

  “Now get me some nylons,” Burdette said.

  “What?”

  “Nylons. Stockings.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  She pulled several pairs of nylons out of the drawer and tossed them to him. One of them fell on the floor and he told her to pick it up and hand it to him. “Now back up,” he said. “And face that wall.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “You’ll know in a minute.”

  “Jack. Don’t. Please.”

  “Shut up. Do what I tell you.”

  Jessie looked at me once more and then turned, moving to the far wall, and stood facing the wallpaper.

  “Okay, lover boy,” Burdette said. “It’s your turn. Make a slipknot in this.” He handed me one of the nylons.

  “Go to hell.”

  He raised the shotgun so that it was against my neck. “Don’t you think I’d kill you?”

  “Yes. I think you would.”

  “Then make a knot.”

  I made a slipknot in the legs of Jessie’s nylons and gave it back to him.

  He tested it, pulling it tighter. “Now turn around.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Say good-bye.”

  The shotgun was still against my neck and I turned around. He pulled my arms behind me and slipped the knot over my wrists, making them burn, and then laid the shotgun on the bed and pulled me down so that I was kneeling and tied my feet and knotted the two ends, stretching me backward on my knees. He wrapped another stocking around my head, across my mouth, gagging me, and then made a loop around the leg of the bedstead. Then he pushed me over. I lay on the floor looking up at him, at his tan pants and maroon-shirted stomach. Against the far wall, Jessie had turned around, facing me. She was crying again.

  “All right,” Burdette said. “We’re done here.”

  He picked up the shotgun from the bed and lifted her suitcase; he took Jessie by the arm and led her out of the bedroom. That was the last I saw of her. She was wearing a warm sweater and she was crying and her brown hair was tangled.

  I didn’t see any of the rest of it. I could hear only the frightened sounds coming from the boys’ bedroom down the hall. TJ and Bobby were awakened and being forced to dress and I could hear the muffled sound of Jessie’s voice trying to reassure them, but the boys were both crying, and then there was the harsh deeper sound of Burdette’s voice. When they were finished in the bedroom they walked out through the kitchen toward the back door. The door banged shut and in a moment there was the sound of a car starting up on Hawthorne Street; then there was the sound of it driving away. After that there wasn’t anything.

  For the rest of that Sunday night and for most of Monday I lay in the bedroom on the floor in the old Fenner house. When he left, Burdette had not bothered to turn the light off and during the night I lay on the floor under the bright overhead light. For some reason that bothered me especially, that no one in Holt noticed it burning. But no one did. So I lay for a long time thinking about that and about other things, and then gradually it began to turn day outside, and now whether or not there was a light on in the bedroom of an apartment house at the west edge of town wouldn’t make any difference to anyone. Time passed very slowly. Occasionally I managed to sleep a little. Then I would wake again. My ear had stopped bleeding but my feet and hands felt numb and the edges of my mouth hurt from being stretched.

  Meanwhile outside I could hear cars going by and I could hear the sound of kids going to school and the barking of someone’s dog. Four or five times during the day the phone rang on the wall out in the kitchen. I lay and listened to it ring. Afterward I learned that one of the calls had been Mrs. Walsh, calling from the Holt Mercury, and that another had come from the Holt Cafe, from Jessie’s boss, wanting to know why she hadn’t returned to work. I never learned who made the other calls.

  Finally, late on Monday afternoon, I was released. Mrs. Nyla Waters, Jessie’s neighbor, had grown worried about seeing my car parked in front of the house all day so she had called Bud Sealy. And so, about five o’clock, Bud Sealy came over to investigate. He came inside and found me tied up in the bedroom. “What in the hell?” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

  He had to help me get up. While I got dressed I told him what had happened.

  All of that was three months ago. Since then time has passed as usual. It is the middle of January now, the start of another year, and people in Holt are still talking about the events of last fall. In town Joe Don Williams remains particularly upset about things, since it happened to be his shotgun that Burdette had with him that night. Burdette took it from the rack in Williams’s unlocked pickup. The pickup was parked in the alley behind Jenny New-comb’s house. So people are talking about that now too.

  And in the intervening months the police have begun to send
out all-points bulletins again, as they did once before when Burdette disappeared. This time they’ve charged him with kidnap as well as theft. But they haven’t been able to locate him. For as Jessie remarked about him that night in the bedroom: he’s good at that. If nothing else, Jack Burdette knows how to disappear.

  So I am still in Holt County. I am still publishing the weekly newspaper my father turned over to me years ago. And Wanda Jo Evans is still in Pueblo, living on the Front Range, working for the phone company. And Nora Kramer, that fragile black-haired girl I married out of college a long time ago, is living once more with her father in Denver and they seem to be quite happy.

  But Jessie? What about her?

  Somewhere in this great world I want to believe that she is all right too. I want to believe that she and TJ and Bobby are still alive, even if it is in California with Jack Burdette. No one has heard anything about them since that night, but I want to believe that much and I hope for more.